Hi, I am Greebo in-game. Most of what you may need is just a few pointers. We will all make mistakes but let's try to cut down on some of those. A lot makes sense once you grasp some fundamentals. So let's have some fun.

A general tip - you can copy the page URL into Google Translate and get a version in your own language. But buddy, if English is your language, don't do it. And stop eating that crayon.

The game's name is a lie. This is not a typical idle clicker. You can play it a number of ways. I tend to micro-manage and minimally click like some kind of hybrid RPG-Runner game.
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1955446627 The key thing to notice is that when there is something special to see, a red dot appears.

Rewound Time lets you claim rewards for levels progress.
Guided Tasks tracks mini-objectives rewarded with Ore or Diamonds.
The Tavern is where you can convert "drinks" received into mercenary cards.

The Mine is to collect income from one you have captured.
Adventure Credential is a running campaign rewards section that has Goals.
Hourglass contains options to smooth progress with Ore.

Clicking the icon by your name brings up your character page and from here you can change gender or name and view your awesomeness.

Left wing: This opens a range of options from daily rewards to explore queue, more on these later. You should be aiming to do as many daillies as possible, this resets at midday in Europe time. The "achievements" section is for in-game targets - not the Steam-based totals but landmarks that give you currency and together add up to cosmetic items (see achievement wall).

Right wing: This opens a range of side activity (more later) and gifts that the red dot will lead you to but worth mentioning are the settings - browse these, you can for example turn on offline progress.

Bottom left: Role is the most important as it contains all your mercenaries - when in there it is usually easier to press "Manage" for a different view. Stats and Equipment buttons are for upgrades. Global chat is disabled by pressing "Message Pop". With Synergy you pair fighters to gain temporary levels in combat based on how they match their partner.

Bottom right: Clicking the 8 buttons triggers 4 merc ultimates, 1 player ultimate and 3 player abilities - these base on which artifact is equipped, change that with your switch button (more later). The auto toggle is not there at first and you will rarely need it but it allows you to stop them autocasting ults so you can time them. Even when auto is on you can force an ult anyway. The green bars are health and the yellow bars are ultimate build up till the character icon pulses with filled power.

Ok there is an elephant in the room: cash. If you want to spend real world money then fine, your choice. The tail for the month is good value - the only problem is you get used to using it but there is also a permanent card that does not need renewal, for a steady income. Moving past that, there are of course many in-game currencies.

Store locations: General store for diamond purchases is the top left button. Souvenir coin shop is on the left tab under Endless Click. Arena on the right hand tab has a shop tab for its coin. Under Friends on right hand side, Flowers have their own shop.

Iron: You can get this by clicking mine carts or by dismantling equipment, more for higher rarity but still nothing like the amount you have to put in to get legends (see last chapter). So hoard this like a broody dragon with greedy hobbits all around. The reason why you will use it all fast is upgrading items or min/maxing their stats.

Flowers: You can add up to 60 friends; from those you can send 60 flowers a day and receive 20, except you do not lose any flowers. Each day you will get 200 flowers. I am not a florist but hey if it works it works. What happens though is that the game counts up the numbers of flowers you quantumly send and they are part of the achievement totals count. The second part is plundering graves! No, not really. It seems at first as if you are losing something if a friend reaches your grave but they get a random item (not yours) and you get 20 flowers. So it is worth finding graves and having them found. Max friends: more funerals. Flowers are one of the 2 ways to buy more time keys or you can use them to buy skillbooks to level up your mercs and artifacts.

Souvenir Coin: Have touched on this in the next section, conserve this as the source can be erratic at times and you may want to get specific things later. This is the only reason to run an autoclicker since the gold is negligible but it gets you some more souvenir coin totals. The devs are fine with that. Best thing to buy here is gold ore for upgrading on the hourglass.

Arena Coin: Early in the game, your best bet is 80 coin x10 per day to give you 8k souls. You might want to consider buying blessings scrolls later as they can upgrade the rarity of your mercs, once you have decided which ones are your best team.

Time Keys: You can get these on daillies or buy them. I tend to rewind 3 times a week and let my team get as far as they can on a rewind so keys are not usually an issue. To make them you can either pay 300 flowers a day or 150 diamonds for the first or 250 for the second. They are used for 3 things - leaping early to blow away a few hundred levels; leaping late to get closer to your storage to buy it back; lastly to feed the meter and rewind sooner. The last one is only worth considering as a last resort, not as a routine method. I used to say do not leap at the start but recent changes to Dark Iron yields mean it might be worth a few leaps early. The same changes to Dark Iron make it better to explore for Time (after Souls) which is why filling meter is needed less.

A lot of the currency is just chaff. The Scales that power the artifacts are meh. The medals are only used for pvp so I would not waste currency on them. The mana crystals take so many to get up an artifact that you will want to concentrate on mercs first. (The actual best to use artifacts are daggers for Golden Woods, Axe for flexibility and Fire Shield for defence.) If you want any sort of fun and not an endless grind to then, use the currency on the other stuff till you feel ready. The other bits and pieces explain themselves and none of them really matter. There are just 3 I want to discuss.

Gold: Its used for little things like greasing the wheels when fusing but so what. The main thing gold equates to is Stats. Spend it on the stats wheel roughly equally. Some people just stack Attack but again, I could be wrong, but I disagree. Every 5 points gives a boost. Every 30 across the board gives other boosts and every 30 total. Everything screams do it levelly, in multiples of 30. If you upgrade on the hourglass with gold ore you can cut the costs here.

Souls: Souls give raw power that lasts through rewinds and makes the biggest impact. Souls amplify your explore queues (next chapter), raise your characters base abilities and give bonuses as you level them. A vital resource.

Diamonds: So what do you buy with these? My advice is concentrate on Lucky Cards but use rerolls to get at least 200 orange shards before picking a card. Taverna is not good value because a 3 star is only 1/16th of an orange card. Storage will have to be considered round about level 1000 onwards.

There is so much additional stuff that helps with main progress. But first, this shocker:

PVP is a myth. You fight against an imprint only. So anytime you think "oh no they have much higher level characters" then relax a little.

That may seem redundant but some people get anxious over pvp. So no worries, mate.

Tower of Time is free to enter and does not reset. That in a way is part of the problem. Do not blow all the Souvenir Coins you make in it as once you hit a wall and are waiting a week to progress, you might want to buy shards for a merc with those Coins. On the other hand, you know what boss you are facing in it, can pick a lineup and wait to get a buff then go take him on. And again. And again. Some of the fights will be long bitter grudge matches. And some over in seconds.
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1982612784 Another big plus is that if you win it automatically moves on to the next boss so you can wander away.

Dungeons are very significant also. But they vary in usefulness by where you are.
https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1960135215 Golden Woods: Gold, who needs it? You do. It all ties in to the stats upgrades. Gold from here lets you breeze through most content faster. If you use Time Leaps too much then you will be at a huge power deficit and need to do a lot of Golden Woods to compensate or you have just done a dead run in the main game. The essential dungeon for a good run. Try to run with 2-3 players as the yield is higher.

Rogue Hero: This is the best till about 1600, when Golden Woods takes over more. It gives you 3 sets of shards (the same ones as the 3 weak characters you fight.) Again try for more players entering at the same time as you get more merc shards.

Armorsmith's Treasure: The gear you get is the level you would pick up normally so only use it at your Highest Level, not on the way. You will get iron by clicking the mine carts. This becomes the greatest dungeon for pushing hard, from about level 2500, by helping upgrade gear.

Explore Queues - as your Explore xp goes up you unlock more queues and more per type. I would rank them in importance of Souls, Time, Iron, Coin. You get bonuses for the level of mercs exploring and for sets that meet conditions like "all male". Keep at least 40 mercs available for this.

Goldmine: You get iron when you attack one so if you are short for crafting then attack a mine you cannot win for iron if you have a lot of pickaxes. You can start attacking them early-ish (level 451) but in practice your lunar power may exclude you from low level ones. I would only take the loot if I was about to upgrade to a much higher mine.

Save mine capital till your next rewind and it will bankroll the new team.

Pets

These beauties unlock at level 931 and you can deploy 2 of them at once. The problem you will have is that to maintain their bonuses they need fed. You can Feed under the Train section for Growth or by clicking on the heart to boost happiness. They need over 15% happiness to work. What I do is underploy my pets until I am running Golden Woods or pushing hard at my top levels. This way I do not have to feed them often.

Events alternate by week from Arena to Sprint

Arena Your tickets refresh at 1 per hour. Your ranking can go up or down based on results and there are rewards for each rank gained in addition to 5 daily ones to claim. The pvp boosters from Medals can be used here but personally I do not think it is worth spending your arena coins on those. Try to take it easy and not worry about results here - they will not affect the main game. Four popular mercs from the previous seasons will be banned, one of them being from two seasons before and three from the most recent. This keeps it fresh. You can also earn a special avatar if you reach Master.

Sprint These events allow you to get specific booster cards for the elements of your choice by joining Factions and doing tasks within them. At the end of the Sprint Week you will get rewards based on your final level.

Leagues have you join up to 3 guilds to go on special ore mining missions, hunt down monsters on a list for bounties or a special pvp event. You can also chat to your guild in-game on the menu dropdown normally used for private messages. Mercs used for mining can still be in main team, arena or explore but you need to try to pick early if you want to use your best as there can only be one of each merc on each team. At present Hunting gives 20 tries for precious skillbooks as a reward - watch your elements as some are immune; your gear does not matter for this. The pvp league gives rather low rewards but try to pick the enemy general if you can beat him, for the highest score.

Treasure Maps will let you "search" for Runes to improve your Artifacts but I would not worry too much about this - if you get one, great. If not, you are not missing out on much.

For the perfect Merc team you must have: whatever you are happy with and nothing else will work.

People will tell you "oh this merc is god tier, s tier, diamond tier, worthless." Sure some have strengths but apply these 3 rules and think for yourself:

• Try to long-term build a team of 8 mercs so you can swap in element changes.
  
• Do not overload one element as it is harder to evolve multiples.
  
• What keeps the whole team alive longer and more effective?

There are quite a few setups that work well so find what suits you best. Generally people will go for 1 Support, 1 Tank, 2 DPS or 2 Support, 2 DPS or 3 DPS, 1 Support. When looking at DPS, there are quite a few that will help but I would especially rate Draculis, Wanda, Grimmond or Leaf.

Our team pool would want a mix of elements so that as we go through the different regions of the game we can play to our strengths.

Up till level 1100 I used whatever had turned up - Vonil, Dynor, Canida Luna and Shari. Nothing wrong with those. What is worth noting is that your lineup will definitely change as you progress through the game so do not worry about getting an "endgame" team early on. Lili and Feu are good up to about 2k but after that Kassandra and others come into more strength.

You can do things like add supports or drop them depending on difficulty. As I developed mercs the setup has changed. My main set now is Draculis, Wanda, Kassandra and Shari.

We all have learning to do. Or was it evolving?

Evolving

You will know that to evolve a merc you need what it asks you to input on the slots - mercs based on the same unit, same element and same job role. When should you evolve though? Do not worry about evolving something you later do not like - as long as you do not evolve too high, it will be fodder for another later evolution. The deeper you go into "blood moon" (above stars) territory the more committed you are. My advice is if you are enjoying a merc but still are not sure, take it to 1 or 2 blood moons to get a better idea of strength and still keep it flexible.

Any merc will evolve into something useful at some point or at the very least be fine for using on explore queues. There is the option of Switching mercs - I recommend you only do this with 3 star mercs as the cost for higher is steep. It is tempting to switch 4 star but they can be useful fodder.

If you want a 3 blood moon then look at the potential path there - you would need your 2 blood moon and 5 single blood moons including one the same so play around with permutations. If you do not have enough right there, hold off on committing any - there may be flexible choices and rushing will not help.

Ability points

You get an ability point every 30 points allocated into the stats with gold. In general, you will be focusing on the ones your main team use. If you run a speedrun team for lower levels do not give points for them as they are breezing content anyway. For most characters the best stat is Attack Speed. This is because it lets you get their ultimate more often, followed by Attack, Defense, Health, etc. Now this might need tailored to specific heroes but there are 2 main exceptions:

• Tanks - Attack Speed (for ult), Defense, Health, Skill Power, Attack, Etc
  
• Supports - Attack, Attack Speed then the rest - this is because heals are based on Attack.

The one touch ability point upgrade is now a lot better than it was but be careful.

Passive skills

Each merc now has a Passive that unlocks at BM1 rank. Interestingly, you can sacrifice a unit of BM1 (don't do this with higher) to release a copy of that passive which can then be used on other mercs. A BM1-2 can take one extra passive, a BM3-4 can take two extra and a BM5 can add 3. You can click on the plus sign on an empty skill slot to browse your own available ones or the full set by hitting the blue button. There are some nice options available but as a starting point tank passives tend to help tanks a lot and support ones generally help supports.

Levelling

The costs for level up on mercs gets steeper as you go. For example, it costs about 4k souls to get from level 1 to level 20 then at level 80 its over 130k per level. We need to ensure we get the most out of the souls we get. On explore queues you should know to put your teams in at level 20 since the return for that 4k souls investment is great. My advice is once your main team hits level 70-80 start to up the levels of your unused mercs that will go on explore. Raise all to 25, then 30 etc, till they hit 40. This will give massive returns on souls, dark iron, time and pays itself back over a period. If you upgrade on the hourglass with soul ore you can cut the costs here.

Downlevel mercs for free up to level 15 at Sword, 20 at Bow, 25 at Shield, etc.

Crafting Items

When should you craft? With the recent crafting changes, the answer is as soon as you feel you can afford it and need to but note that it is dark iron used up with no long term reward at levels below 1100. What costs insane amounts now is the customisation so while crafting at lower levels makes more sense now, customising does not.

Advanced fuse button is cheaper than crafting up side material if you lack epics to level up a legend.

In the crafting tables for each item you will see blueprints needed for some of the items and others that are lit. We get bonuses for lighting up all those items (288) and that also makes them available to craft.

There are 4 methods for unlocking those blueprints:

• Randomly get that item from the game (chests, mimics, bosses, leaps)
  
• Buy one from resources in store for about 10 diamonds for a regular, etc.
  
• Customisation (see below)
  
• Fusing 3 identical ones of the previous tier:

Each banding in the craft table shows you which ones relate to each other. The top left of the normal rings x3 turn into the top left of the rare rings and so on. Just have a look at the craft table using a normal item so the whole table shows; if you do not have 3x of the one below it, see if you are able to craft one of the same tier and type into it to make a set. You fuse those and the next tier up unlocks. This should only be used if you are desperate for that item set.

Main character needs the full set of 4 to get the bonuses. For the mercs you just need a pair.
I am using anti-heal as the set of 4 and ones that reduce damage on the mercs.

Customisation

So you have a daily for rare teleport stones for customising 3 times. Unless you coincidentally happen to need to use customise right then anyway, here is what I recommend. Pick an item of the same class as one you can see you are missing a type (from the craft view table) and then customise that 3 times. It might hit nothing, in which case, you at least fulfilled a daily challenge blip towards getting the 3 bonus chests. Or it might hit another of the 288 variations. For this reason, I recommend not junking all the excess items till you know you want to. It is best to do this with very low level gear as it costs less.

As for real customisation, it is mostly self explanatory - a fine tuning of the stats on an item, usually a legend. Remember to lock your legends appearance if you do not want to mess up a set. Normally I will lock 4 or 5 stars unless we are at that min/max point where everything counts and we have plenty of iron in which case 5 star or nothing. You can do a separate customise of one line to replace a stat type you do not want like crit. Generally people recommend using Attack, Defense, Health and changing others but note that damage bonus will pop up sometimes and that is pretty nice. If you are using items that gain bonuses from critical attacks you might value Critical Damage more.

Stuck on Hard Bosses

There are things you can try, do not give up quickly at walls, sometimes being flexible works:

• Consider how your mercs and main weapon count on elemental wheel
  
• Sword disrupts, Shield stuns, Bow hooks them closer, Hammer for heal/stun
  
• Manually control the timing of your abilities in combat
  
• Running Golden Woods will increase your power
  
• Buff obelisks - Faster attack, Damage bonus, Typhoon tide, Crit bonus and some others
  
• Customisation of items can be costly but must be considered

If you have passed the boss on a previous run you can use offline progress to slip past them.

Pushing or not?

Only you know the right answer to this one. It feels great to push to 410% difficulty, get a bonus, you have made some progress. There are a couple of downsides when you manage it - you have to recraft gear totally rather than upgrade and your next run will not hit your highest level at 100% but far more. You may start to feel penalised for too much progress. You will judge what is fun for you, everyone is different. I just want to put the thought to you - steady slow progress still lets you build mercs from rewards and can ultimately then accelerate you while never being too hard. This is not about what anyone else does, just that you have fun your way.

Beyond that - have fun, use global chat or Discord and enjoy a great game.